When I went wedding dress shopping for the first time, one of the accessories they had for sale was a crown. Literally. A fake gold one with fake diamonds. There was not a single trace of irony anywhere else in the store, so I'm assuming the crown wasn't an exception.

Why any bride would want to look like a member of the Burger King royal family is beyond me, but the fact that such items are offered just underscores that—according to The Knot, Brides magazine, Style Me Pretty, and most movies starring Kate Hudson—the best day of my life will be November 23, 2013, the day I am getting married. Now that I am planning my wedding, I encounter this platitude pretty much constantly. And it irks me. I mean, why stop at the date? Why not also decree which exact millisecond of my ceremony will represent the greatest joy I will ever experience?

To clarify: I'm not anti-wedding. Actually, I love them. I reliably weep (and get a little smashed) at every one I attend. And on a daily basis, I feel a kind of sweet disbelief that gawky me is marrying such a dashingly sweet man. But I see an insidious problem in the marketing of weddings as "the happiest day of your life." The pressure that is placed upon this event to be the alpha and omega of your entire existence makes it, I think, into a kind of nuptial New Year's Eve, and we all know how that usually turns out. By the end of the night, you almost always realize: this was fine, but I'd be just as happy had I stayed in.

It's not that I think weddings—or marriages—are letdowns. It's just that I want to see my wedding as one awesome achievement on a continuum of achievements, all of which were, in their way, just as beautiful and profound for having led me to the current one.

For example: I found a strength I didn't know I had when I made it to the other side of my breakup with my college boyfriend, a disaster that broke my heart into a thousand pieces. Coping with the loneliness drove me to try stand-up, a lifelong dream, at a sparsely attended open mike in a gritty bar on the Lower East Side of Manhattan, which two years later led me to tell the story of the aforementioned split in front of 4,000 people at Central Park SummerStage. It was an achievement, in my late 20s, to realize I needed to go to therapy and deal with the fact that even though I wanted a boyfriend, I was a mess of a human being. It was an accomplishment when I put together an Ikea dresser all by myself (crooked but standing). And I'm proud of the fact that, seven years later, slightly better and more self-aware, I sent an e-mail to my friends letting them know that I was available to be set up with any likely contenders. This was how I ended up at a hole-in-the-wall on a magical first date with Mike, my future husband. Since that night, there have been hundreds of moments in our relationship that I wish I could have had my best friends present to stand and cheer.

Including the night, months before we ever said I love you, that we had an impromptu whiskey picnic sitting cross-legged on the rug and he told me simply, "I'm in."

The other reason I don't want to think of my wedding as a finish line is I don't want to think of myself or my dreams as finished. There are so many things I still want to achieve, some of which involve Mike and some of which are just about me. I want to be a good mother. I want to go to Australia and take the same goofy picture of me holding a koala that everyone else takes. I want to write a movie in which Clive Owen and I play astronauts who have an affair while on a mission to Mars (the koala thing might be easier).

Ultimately, I want to see my wedding as a fancier version of the kind of pencil mark you made on a door frame when you were a kid tracking your height. None of these marks were the best (or the worst): They were just you, growing.

Jessi Klein is a New York–based comedian who writes for "Inside Amy Schumer."